Mass Design Group has published its latest COVID-19 guide aimed at retrofitting and upgrading existing senior living facilities to minimize pandemic transmission. The Designing Senior Housing for Safe Interaction; The Role of Architecture in Fighting COVID-19 guide follows a strategy document published by the group earlier this year focused on adapting existing hospital spaces to better deal with a surge of patients suffering from airborne disease. 

Mass Design Group's latest guide highlights the high level of infections and deaths that have taken place within these facilities and offers a bevy of approaches for minimizing the ways in which residents are exposed to the disease.

The guide offers a series of recommendations, including articulating more generous and clearly defined thresholds within the residential sections of senior housing facilities, adapting existing pick up and drop off spaces to allow for extra capacity and social distancing, and using semi-public zones within senior living facilities to create buffer zones between the public and residents. 

Additionally, the guide recommends using windows to facilitate airflow within spaces and recessing entry thresholds into individual units in order to create spaces specifically geared toward donning PPE, storing packages, and other preventative activities. 

The report also highlights double loaded corridors as a design configuration that should be reconsidered, not just in terms of dimension, but also in terms of conceptual arrangement. The typical six-foot width of these corridors, the report argues, is insufficient for proper social distancing while its often windowless and dense configuration prevent proper ventilation.